


Playing Santa

by DKNC



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Christmas Fluff, F/M, with a bit of smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 07:25:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5530904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DKNC/pseuds/DKNC
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s Christmas Eve, and Ned Stark is pretty much over the whole toy assembly business. Fortunately, not all play is for children.</p>
<p>Originally written for the Countdown to Wintertown challenge from GameofShipsChallenges on tumblr, this is a wee little Christmas gift for all you lovely people who love Ned and Catelyn Stark. :-)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Playing Santa

“Damn, damn, damn!” Ned Stark looked at the two pieces of plastic in his hands.

“What’s wrong, Ned?” his wife asked calmly from where she sat five feet away putting about seven million stickers on a dollhouse for the girls.

“I think I broke this,” he answered.

“Let me see,” she said, coming over and taking the pieces from him. “No,” she said after a moment. It’s made in two separate pieces. You just snapped it apart. Here.” She snapped it back together and handed it to him. “What is it anyway?”

“I think it’s a support for the bridge.”

“You think? What do the directions say, Ned?”

“I don’t know. They’re in the box.”

She rolled her eyes. “What is so difficult about reading directions?” she asked him.

“It’s just snapping pieces of plastic together,” he countered. “Why does that even need directions?”

She had pulled said directions out of the box and was looking at them and at the roadway he had already assembled. “Because,” she said after a moment, “If you looked at the directions, you would realize that none of those orange pieces go together. They’re supposed to have blue pieces in between them, and that’s why you couldn’t get the bridge support to go in. It goes under one of the blue pieces.” She held one up. “See?”

“We should have just wrapped up all the boxes with cards saying, ‘Love, Santa,’” he grumbled.

“Oh, you’d rather be assembling this tomorrow with Robb and Jon bouncing up and down on top of you impatiently? You’ll be glad it’s finished, my love. I promise.”

“If you say so.” He took the directions from her, and proceeded to pull apart the orange pieces he’d just put together. “Did Lyanna tell you if she’d for sure be here tomorrow?” Cat’s mention of Jon had reminded him that his sister hadn’t actually committed to showing up for Christmas. At least not to him.

“No,” Catelyn sighed. “Jon will be so disappointed if she doesn’t show. He was hoping she’d come tonight.”

“I was hoping she’d come tonight. She could have helped us with this crap.”

“Ned, it’s not crap. And Jon will have a good Christmas. We’ll make certain of it. And whenever Lyanna does show up, don’t fuss at her, okay? It won’t help, and if the two of you are angry, it will only upset Jon.”

“I know. It’s just . . . it’s Christmas, Cat. He’s her son. She should be here.”

“She’s trying, Ned. You know she is. She’s actually making money on this tour. She sends something every week.”

“Rock star wanna be is not the best career choice for the single mother of an eight year old.”

Catelyn fell silent then, returning to her stickers. He knew she agreed with him about Lyanna’s supposed career. She just had a knee-jerk response when it came to defending family members—his family members included. They’d had Jon at least seventy-five percent of the time over the past three months, and she never balked at taking him in. He shouldn’t put her in the position of defending Lyanna to him as well.

He loved his sister. He truly did. And he knew she loved her son. It was almost as if she couldn’t see what her constant absences did to him. Or maybe she just didn’t want to see it.

He used a bit too much force to snap two of the orange pieces apart, and one went flying across the room.

“Fuck.”

“I’d love to, but we have to finish setting up the toys first.”

“You aren’t funny, Cat,” he said as he walked over to retrieve the plastic road piece he’d managed to launch like a missile.

“No. I’m dead serious. Be a good little boy and Mrs. Santa will reward you.” She turned to him and smiled. “That was the last sticker. Now what else needs doing?” She walked over to him and bent down to pick something up, giving him an eyeful of her perfect ass in her blue jeans.

“You’re killing me here, Cat,” he said, grabbing at her.

“Nope,” she said, scooting out of his reach. “Work before play, Santa. If you work nicely, maybe I’ll even play naughty.”

He rolled his eyes. “Promises, promises.”

“Oh, Bran is going to love this!” she exclaimed, pulling from a box some large plastic thing that looked like it had a ladder, a slide, and a tunnel with various things that could be spun or pushed scattered all over it.

“What’s it do?” he asked. “Does it make a lot of noise?”

“Um, some of these things make noise if you press them hard enough, but mostly it’s for him to climb around on. See, he can go through this tunnel part, or up over it onto the slide.”

He frowned at her. “Bran’s two years old. Should we really be encouraging this climbing obsession of his?”

She shrugged. “He’s going to climb whatever we do. Better to have him do it on something designed for two year olds to climb than on the hearth and the counters. Now, what else do we have?”

“Hey, no fair! That didn’t require assembly at all! You just had to drag it out of a box.”

“Dollhouse stickers,” she said flatly. That was her response any time he complained that he got a harder Christmas Eve job. He hated doing stickers with a passion, and she knew it. “Oh! I almost forgot the stockings!” she exclaimed, and she ran to the kitchen to get the candy and little toys she’d stashed in there.

He looked at the mantel. She’d gotten new stockings for all of them this year, because Lyanna had dumped Jon with them on short notice last Christmas, and she’d seen how disappointed he was that he just had a generic stocking she’d grabbed last minute which didn’t match. So this year she’d been prepared. Jon’s stocking had his name on it and looked just like Robb’s and Bran’s. All the stockings matched, but his and Cat’s had Santa and Mrs. Claus on them, the boys’ had snowmen, and the girls’ had angels. “These are so cute,” she murmured, as she put the little Star Wars figures in each stocking. All the kids except Bran were getting lightsabers, too, and Ned worried a bit about arming Arya, even with colored plastic. They’d taken all four of the older kids to the new movie. Arya, at four probably wasn’t old enough to really understand much of it, but she’d sat through it without once asking to get up, clapping her hands and squealing through most of the action scenes. Jon and Robb had been using everything in the house remotely tubular as lightsabers ever since, and Sansa had been proclaiming loudly that she was now going to be both a Disney princess AND a Jedi when she grew up. And fly spaceships.

“I think I’ve got it!” Ned said, realizing that he had just snapped the last piece onto the track and that it actually looked like the picture on the box.

“Strong work, my love. Now we have to do the stickers for it.”

“Stickers? What stickers?”

“There aren’t many. Here they are.” She pulled a small single sheet of paper out. That didn’t look too bad.

“Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll do these. You go get that bottle of wine that’s in the kitchen and two glasses, and we’ll toast another completed year of Santa Claus duty.”

“We’re finished?” he asked hopefully. 

She knelt down and kissed him. “We are finished,” she assured him. “As soon as I get these stickers on.”

He jumped up to run into the kitchen. The bottle was on the counter, and the glasses were easy to find, but he opened at least five drawers without finding the corkscrew. “Cat?” he called. “Where is the corkscrew?”

“In the drawer to the left of the stove,” she called back, almost too quietly for him to hear. “And if you wake any one of those children, I will murder you, Eddard Stark.”

He grinned as he poured the wine. He’d let her have her toast, and then he was taking his wife to bed. She had promised after all. Thinking about his bed, and all the things he’d like to do to his wife in it, kept the smile on his face as he walked back out into the living room. What he saw there nearly made him drop the wine glasses.

In the only area of the living room floor free of toys, his wife lay propped up on a couple of sofa cushions wearing nothing but a Santa hat.

“Cat?” he stuttered.

“Oh good, you brought the wine.”

“Um, you did the stickers already?”

She smiled. “I told you there weren’t many.”

He sat down beside her, his eyes taking in her long legs, round hips, and full breasts. God, she was a gorgeous woman. He was a very lucky man. Her hair hung down beneath the silly little fur hat, and he reached out to run his fingers through it.

She smiled. “A toast?” she said, taking one of the glasses. “To Christmas!”

“To my naked wife,” he answered, clinking his glass against hers.

“Not fair,” she responded after taking a sip. “I want a naked husband to toast.”

“I can arrange that.” He did have a momentary panic as he stripped, imagining one of the kids watching from the top of the stairs. He even turned around to look. “The kids,” he said, as she pulled him down for a kiss.

“It’s well past their normal wander out of bed hours and nowhere near their ridiculously early waking hours,” she whispered against his lips and then his neck. “Barring a sudden thunderstorm, we should be perfectly safe.”

“But . . .”

She sighed. “Have some wine, Ned,” she said lifting a glass. Instead of handing it to him, however, she poured a bit on each of her nipples, and Ned didn’t give another thought to any of his children as he took first one and then the other wine-drizzled nipple into his mouth. By the time they’d taken about a dozen turns each tasting wine from just about every place they could think of on each other’s bodies, he didn’t remember he had children.

Finally, he couldn’t stand it any longer, and he laid her down with that gorgeous hair spread all around her face—the Santa hat had long since been discarded—and he pushed himself deep inside her, thinking that here was no better feeling in the world. She threw her arms around him holding him tightly against her as she moved her hips beneath him, and he pressed his face to her neck. She smelled of wine and her Italian perfume, and Catelyn. God, he loved the scent of her. And the feel of her and sight of her and taste of her. She gasped slightly as he thrust inside her, and he smiled. He liked the sounds she made, too, although five children in the house had taught them both how to make love nearly silently. He’d learned to cherish each little sharp intake of breath or soft cry smothered against his shoulder.

He knew she was close, and so was he. When she actually bit his shoulder with a brief, muffled high pitched cry, and her body tensed beneath him, he let himself go, and felt the sweet release that never ceased to thrill him. Even after nearly a decade of marriage. Afterward, he held her against him as their heart rates and breathing slowly returned to normal. He kissed her earlobe and it still tasted of wine.

“You’re amazing,” he whispered.”

He felt rather than saw her smile as his face was against her ear and cheek. “Do you still wish your sister were here to help us set up the Christmas toys?” she asked.

He laughed out loud. “Not on your life.” He kissed her lips. “I love you, Cat.”

“I love you, too. Merry Christmas, Ned.”

“Merry Christmas, my love.”

She laid her head down on his chest, and hummed contentedly as he ran his hand through her hair.

“I don’t really want to move, but we’d better get up,” she said after a moment. “Otherwise, I’ll fall asleep, and if the kids find the two of us like this on Christmas morning, I’m afraid they’ll be scarred for life.”

He yawned as he laughed. “All right. Come on, Mrs. Claus,” he said, sitting up and pulling her up as well. “You head up to bed and I’ll gather up the clothes and wine glasses.” She kissed him and then then turned to go, giving him a lovely view of her naked ass as she walked up the stairs.

Christmas morning came too early as it did every year with excited children who had no respect for their elders who’d spent long midnight hours on stickers and plastic racetracks. He and Cat stumbled sleepily down the stairs behind their brood of Christmas-crazed tots and collapsed onto the couch to watch them excitedly discover the bounty Santa Claus had delivered.

Of course, Ned had the video camera going at the precise moment Robb bent down to retrieve and hold up a lace covered black item. “Look Daddy!” he shouted. “Santa even brought Mommy a bra!”

He couldn’t resist. He swung the camera over to Cat on the couch, her face as red as her hair, the mortified expression on her face quickly giving way to hysterical giggles.

“And it’s been a very merry Christmas at the Stark house this year,” he said with gusto, thinking once more as he looked at the kids’ smiles and then dodged the throw pillow thrown at his head by his wife, that he was one very lucky man.


End file.
